


Skating Thin Ice

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-02
Updated: 2011-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-23 08:45:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode tag for 2x16. Peter's never had a fatality in the line of duty before. For the h/c bingo square "combat".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skating Thin Ice

There's a lot of paperwork anytime a weapon is fired in the field, but it increases exponentially when there's a fatality. Peter supposes that he ought to be grateful. Between that and all the rest of the paperwork dealing with the wrap-up on the Adler case, it keeps him too busy to think. And most of his spare brain cycles are focused on Neal right now, anyway.

It's been a year since he opened fire at Fowler, fully expecting to kill him, but he doesn't remember feeling much of anything at the time beyond a sort of grim triumph. Pulling the trigger at Vincent Adler's back was the same thing: an instant of clarity, of stillness, and then the report of the weapon in his hand. In both cases, emotion didn't hit until a few seconds later -- elation and relief in Fowler's case, and with Adler ... nothing, really, or everything, an emotion too big to name, that he'd tucked behind his game face: something to be dealt with later. And then the shock of anger and betrayal had washed it away.

Peter has fired his weapon at suspects in the field before, but none of them ever died. He always imagined it had to be different, after seeing how other agents reacted to it. But there was a part of him that never really believed it would be.

It is.

 

* * *

 

The department therapist's name is Dr. Glenn. "Call me Renee," she says, but Peter can't quite bring himself. She's in her fifties, matronly and serene, but he can see that her smiles don't quite reach her eyes. She's been working with law enforcement, police and firefighters for twenty-five years, she says.

He doubts that he could say anything she hasn't heard before, so he tries to be honest with her, even when it's like pulling fishhooks through his belly. This is what he'd tell anyone on his team to do: _don't be macho, don't be stupid, don't give it a chance to affect your work performance and endanger your brothers and sisters. There's no "I" in team, and this is part of your job too._

So he tells her all about Adler over the first couple of department-mandated therapy sessions. He's as brutally unflinching with himself as any suspect he ever interrogated. It helps that he doesn't actually feel all that much about it. Not like he's turned into a basket case or anything. He flashes back occasionally -- it's happened twice so far, once in the shower, once reaching for his weapon on the range. Both times like a punch in the gut, but the sort of punch a guy can roll with. He tells her so.

"As long as it's not getting worse, I'd consider it a normal part of working through the trauma," Dr. Glenn says, and asks him about sleep disturbances, nightmares.

Of course he has nightmares; who doesn't? Adler's been featured once or twice, but usually it's not the shooting that makes him wake up, gasping, clutching at the sheets until he calms down enough to feel El's warm weight beside him. His horror isn't that he arrived in time. It's that he almost arrived too late.

"You were afraid for your partner's life."

"Obviously. I wouldn't have done it otherwise."

At the end of the second session, he feels pretty good about the whole thing, right up until Dr. Glenn tells him, "I get the feeling that the shooting isn't bothering you as much as something else about the case."

"I'm not sure what you mean," he says, and so his resolve breaks: it's the first lie he's told in their sessions.

She leans forward in her chair, Martha Stewart with the cool eyes of a combat veteran. "Peter, if you experienced another trauma in the same event, you may be too absorbed in processing those emotions to deal with the shooting itself. Right now you appear to be dealing very well, but if you bury the shooting under something else, we might as well be spending our sessions discussing the Yankees."

He offers her a grin. "They're having a good season." And immediately regrets it, because damn it, that's exactly what Caffrey would do: smile and redirect with a joke.

And the look she's giving him now is probably the same look he's given Neal on more than one occasion. "It won't go away if you bury it. I think we're making good progress, Peter, but if there's something else you need to talk about, we have to get it out into the open in order to move forward."

Maybe talking to her about Neal _would_ help. He's been able to unload himself on El and, to a lesser extent, Diana, but there's a part of him that's desperate to get the opinion of someone who's not so close to the whole thing. He goes around and around in his head about this whole Neal thing -- sometimes he's so angry that his stomach is a knot of molten lead, and sometimes he's eaten with guilt, convinced that he's the betrayer and not the betrayed. The other day he broke the handle off El's favorite coffee cup, didn't even realize he'd closed his hand so hard on it.

And the sessions with Dr. Glenn are confidential. If he tells her that he suspects his partner of a crime and hasn't opened an official investigation, it can't blow back onto either of them ... can it?

In the end, he says nothing, lets her eat her suspicions, and keeps the sessions focused on Adler.

He can't figure out if he's protecting Neal or himself.

 

* * *

 

Two weeks after the shooting, his department-mandated therapy sessions are over. The nightmares haven't really lessened, but they bother him less; the flashbacks haven't resumed after those two isolated incidents, and the standard department inquest has found his use of force "sufficient and necessary". Hughes smiles as he flashes the inquest folder in Peter's office.

"You don't have to stop the therapy at the end of the mandatory sessions," Hughes points out. "Personally I'd suggest continuing as long as you feel it's helping."

So he goes through another week's sessions, ironically to prove to both himself and Hughes that he doesn't need them. By now, even Peter can tell that he and Dr. Glenn are moving in circles around each other. They've gone as far as they can go without talking about Neal. And that's something he's not willing to do. Not yet.

Besides, what's to talk about? He and Neal are fumbling their way back to their old rhythm, and if currents still flow underneath, he can't imagine there's any good to be done by dredging them up to the surface. He hasn't broken any coffee cups lately. He's good, Neal's good, everything's good.

At the end of the last session, he shakes her hand. "Thanks, Doc. I really appreciate it."

Her smile is quick and motherly and, as always, doesn't reach her eyes. "I hope I won't see you back again soon, Peter."

He hopes she says that to all her clients, not just him.


End file.
